What I Learned as a Music Critic,and Why It Still Matters

By Sarah Cahill
Photographs: Christine Alicino

Dave’s Coffee Shop on Broadway in Oakland was always the destination for me to meet a deadline. I started going there soon after becoming the classical music critic for the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly, in 1985. After a concert, I would take the bus to Dave’s, open all night, and sit at the counter and order fried eggs and corned beef hash – the kind that comes in a perfect oval patty, and looks and tastes like dog food – and endless refills of coffee. I would sit there and write out the whole review by hand, and then take it home and type it up on my ancient Royal typewriter. It could be five pages or eight pages – however long was necessary to go into great detail and depth.

Then, after a few hours of sleep, I would wake up and drink more coffee, scribble corrections on the typewritten pages, and then type up the whole thing again and bring it to the East Bay Express office. Rob Hurwitt was my editor and mentor, and we’d talk through corrections, after which he’d hand it over for copyediting and typesetting. The whole process seems hopelessly archaic now, like Gutenberg’s printing press or illuminated manuscripts. But having the freedom to write a review of any length was heavenly.

Those were the golden days of the East Bay Express, when one of my music reviews would fill an entire page of the paper, or even a page and a half. I had lots and lots to say, and felt powerful in our little community. I remember a party in the Berkeley hills in 1990 where I was introduced to a young man named Alex Ross, who had just graduated from Harvard. “You write music reviews for the East Bay Express?” he exclaimed. “That’s exactly what I want to do!” Oh, sure, I thought to myself, there’s only room for one of us in this town.

But by the late ’90s my review space had been whittled down to half a page, and then whittled still further, until it was no fun any more, and it felt like classical music was being marginalized in the Express as it was everywhere else. There were other reasons for stopping: I was focusing on being a pianist; and writing reviews had come to resemble a game of Mad Libs, where you endlessly combine adjectives like “luminous,” “metronomic,” and “vibrant” with nouns like “vibrato,” “pyrotechnics,” and “adagio movement.”

And now, looking back on it, I wonder: What did I learn from all those years as a music critic?

First of all, I learned to be curious about other musicians and composers. I spent time researching them and their repertoire and recordings, trying to understand their musical motivations. That curiosity serves me well hosting weekly radio shows, with frequent interviews, on my program Revolutions Per Minute on KALW in San Francisco (where, by the way, about three quarters of the guests I interview have absolutely no curiosity about me). I also got into the habit of finding and studying scores before a performance, whether it was Elliott Carter’s new Quintet with Ursula Oppens and the Arditti Quartet, or The Rite of Spring, or a Handel oratorio.

Sarah Cahill
Photograph: Christine Alicino

Being a music critic, one ponders the big questions: What makes one performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 132 better than another? How can there be so many different interpretations of Philip Glass’s Études? Why do most piano students play barely any 20th-century music beyond Bartók? How do you write about a new Kaija Saariaho opera in 300 words? Why is everyone suddenly playing Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories? You get a great education when you think this way, week after week.

Getting back to those marathon reviews I wrote for the East Bay Express, I don’t think their lengthiness was pure self-indulgence. Giving that much space to classical music meant the Express valued it, as it valued books and art and theater and pop music. Like most people I know, I feel that absence intensely these days. I scan the arts pages of our major cosmopolitan newspapers and ask these questions daily: Why an avant-garde theater review, but nothing about a major orchestral premiere? Why a new dance piece, but not a new string quartet? Why do the best newspapers in the country now seem the most provincial when it comes to arts coverage?

Now in the Bay Area, we depend on independent writers like Michael Strickland and his excellent Civic Center blog, and Stephen Smoliar and his Rehearsal Studio. Michael and Stephen cover not only the opera and symphony but also plenty of new-music concerts, and without them there would be scant evidence that those events had taken place. Joshua Kosman does a brilliant job at the San Francisco Chronicle, and there’s San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV), and the remarkable Sam Lefebvre, and a handful of others. Social media fills in some of the gaps – for instance, Bonnie Wright’s descriptions on Facebook of concerts she travels to attend. But the landscape has certainly changed drastically.

Composers and musicians need validation, but more than that, they need to feel their work is understood. I see that hunger when guests come on my radio show and talk about themselves, and I hear it from friends who throw everything they have – emotionally and financially and professionally – into a big new project, only to have it vanish into the ether without a trace. We’re all grateful for the excellent music critics in this country, but still miss the freedom and the space they once had, as we miss the daily ritual of reading a beautifully crafted music review.

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Sarah Cahill, recently called “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times, has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to her include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Yoko Ono, and Evan Ziporyn, and she has also premiered pieces by Lou Harrison, Ingram Marshall, Toshi Ichiyanagi, George Lewis, Leo Ornstein, and many others.

Cahill will celebrate Harrison’s 100th birthday with a program featuring his music and works by his peers on April 6 at 7pm at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City; www.lpr.com

Delightful reminiscences & ruminations, Sarah! This carries me back to yesteryear — & makes me miss the Bay Area. (Perhaps at such point as I complete the circle & return north, I might even re-join the local arts-crit ecology in some small capacity, not unlike a variant on Rip Van Winkle.) Keep up the excellent work via alternate means!

One thing, though: I wonder if it’s entirely fair to complain (if it’s a complaint, and I grant that it may not be) that three-quarters of the guests on your radio show have absolutely no curiosity about you.

It strikes me that many of them might feel like asking you questions, when you aren’t the one who agreed to be the subject of an interview, would be prying, or even rude. They signed up to do an interview and expose themselves; as far as they’re likely to know, the interviewer didn’t sign up for that him/herself.

And most journalists have it drummed into them that they are not part of the story and should make themselves part of it, so interviewees don’t ask.

Thanks for bringing this up. But do you really think it’s “prying, or even rude” to ask questions of a radio host when you’re spending time in the studio together? As a guest on someone else’s show, I always want to find out about the person who is doing the interview– his or her background, interests in music, and so on. It just seems like human decency, and you meet some really interesting people that way. And it’s a lot better than the stone cold silence which many guests seem to prefer unless they’re answering questions.

It’s an interesting point about the curiosity of interviewees. I was a print classical music journalist for many years, and now I run a podcast talking to creatives from across sectors. Likewise, many of my guests don’t show curiosity towards me. But what I think they don’t realise is how much of an opportunity they’re missing out on. Those who take an interest start to form a connection, and those are the people I end up introducing to other people, recommending their projects, and with whom I start to have an ongoing collaborative relationship. I think that it’s a skill that musicians, and any other performers, could very well benefit from learning how to do, in a comfortable way. Most interviewers working in the sector are equally passionate about it, and like any ecosystem, we all thrive when we’re actively engaged with each other, in all directions.

Thanks so much, Sarah! I appreciate the leads on blogs on arts writing. As to the interview situation: I feel that expressing a healthy curiosity about another human being is almost always a good thing. It can lead to places you would never imagine. Just a few days ago, I was taking a Lyft ride to the train station in Boston, and the driver turned the volume of the radio down as a courtesy upon our entry. But I was intrigued by the music and asked him to turn it up, and it was invigorating and exciting and pulsating and instantly made you want to dance–it was music from his homeland, Tobago! I had never heard anything from Tabago, had no idea what their music sounded like, and, voila, I have discovered yet another source of gorgeous music.

Further Reading

Cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, who performs nightly in the Stone series at the New School Feb. 19-23, talks with Olivia Giovetti about improvisation as conversation, and choosing to focus on meaningful work.

For musicians of older generations, to watch Face the Music handle improvisation-based works by black female composers at National Sawdust on Feb. 11 was to attempt to mute one's envy, critic and musician Jennifer Gersten asserts.

PUBLIQuartet cellist Amanda Gookin chats with Amanda Angel about "Freedom and Faith," the group’s second album, which it will showcase on Feb. 10 as part of a season-long residency at National Sawdust.